The "big question," says Marc Ambinder, is "will it be an honest budget? If so, it'll be painful to read -- the administration would get real about war costs, for example, and the budget plan would contain deep cuts in favored Democratic programs." I've been warned to expect some pretty grim numbers. The Bush administration had a big bag of tricks that made the budget outlook appear somewhat sounder than it really was. The Obama administration means to do away with those tricks. Let the budget look bad. This is the Obama administration's first budget, not their sixth, so they can't be blamed for what it shows. As Obama likes to say, he "inherited this deficit." They in fact have an incentive to make it maximally dire so their efforts to improve matters will look maximally effective. They get the benefits of the problem without the associated blame. And there are benefits. This gets to their theory of reform: Making things look better than they are obscures the need for change. Tough choices, on the other hand, require answers. And the answers, they'll argue, are the line items on the administration's agenda: The worse the fiscal outlook appears, the more crucial health reform becomes. But I don't understand the end of Ambinder's post. "Remember," he says, "health care reform really can't take begin without a firm idea of what Congress is going to do about Medicare and Medicaid." I'd suggest it's the opposite: Medicare and Medicaid can't really be reformed until Congress has a clear idea of what they'll do about the health system in which the programs operate.
